Before when I was a pre-med student, I was volunteering at a hospital with an old friend of mine from high school. I remember clearly that we were on our break and I told him a dilemma of mine at that time in regards to how I started to fall short in having the heart to do many of the tasks in helping the nurses and patients. This also included falling apart from my passion in becoming a doctor. I saw how many of the doctors and other staffs were treated not only myself but my colleagues and other students, differently just because we don’t have that title of being a doctor or nurse. This resulted in me feeling total disgust and not liking the environment I was in and I told my friend that “we all eat, and pee, and poop” and that there were no lines of distinction in the difference between their human form and ours, yet there was. And this made me feel like, whether I continue pre-med or choose a different career, there will always be people who draw this line to show others how much they can do to be apart of this “social construct” they have created.
There was a research paper I wrote during my freshmen year of college and it was about how YouTubers were influential on the lives of U.S. teenagers. If anything, the YouTubers were more interactive with their viewers, making them more relatable as opposed to those who are celebrities. The purpose during that time of me writing about the YouTubers was (1) the culture that they, YouTubers, have created amongst their followers on social media platforms and users of the younger generation, (2) the community they have formed, allowing teenagers, in particular, to join and to allow them to express themselves as their own individual, and (3) raise awareness in their surrounding community.
I mainly focused on social media because of the interactions YouTubers and their followers had with each other. With that in mind, reflecting on what I have written, I have come to realize that although social media platforms give off this “self-gratifying feeling” of being able to connect with another person who is not in the same room or city as them, it has shaped and reformed our ways of communicating with people. This makes it so easy for all of us to reshape how we want people to view us and how we want people to interpret how we live our lives.
But with what I wrote on that research paper about how YouTubers can be seen as different from celebrities. They too have and are falling in that same line of showing people what they want to see rather than what they can’t see behind cameras and behind every edit frame of a video.
What I’m trying to say is that after reading “A Work in Progress” by Author and YouTuber, Connor Franta, one thing we sometimes forget is that everyone’s life “is no more perfect” than anyone (Franta, 9).
Moral of the story, whether if you are a doctor or a celebrity or YouTuber, we all don't live perfect lives but like Franta said, life is no perfect than one and another and surely all of these imperfections are what makes each individuals life filled with meaning and wonder. We are all different from different backgrounds with different titles, but we are no different from one another.
